Ninja Theory announced that Hellblade is no longer the console exclusive that everyone thought it would be. The game originally came out last August for PC and PS4, and many PS4 gamers thought that Hellblade was console exclusive, but now it appears as if the PS4 audience is losing yet another exclusive.
The game will launch on the Xbox One and for the Xbox One X with the accompanying enhancements for Microsoft’s mid-gen refresh. Gamers will have three different enhanced modes to select from, including Enhanced Visual Mode, which improves the game’s special effects and visual quality throughout the entire game, giving you better flame effects, better spark effects, and better world effects.
There’s also the High Frame-Rate Mode, which enables the game to run at 60 frames per second on a 60hz or higher monitor. The frame-rate mode is perfect for gamers who have grown tired of 30fps gaming and the sub-30fps gaming culture that has been endemic on home consoles for so many years. Xbox One X gamers will finally get a small taste of quality gaming that PC gamers have been enjoying for years.
Last and least is the faux-4K mode, which allows gamers to turn on a dynamic 4K resolution mode that upscales the game to 4K through checkerboarding.
The game itself is kind of one giant, unapologetic advertisement for mental illness, which is probably one of the biggest red herrings in any cultural debate about violence in society.
Anyway, Hellblade is about a mentally unstable chick suffering from psychosis who returns home to find out that her lover is dead and her village razed. She goes on a quest to bury her lover and seek revenge against the demons in her own mind.
Yeah… it’s one of those games.
Anyway, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice‘s most monumental achievement was the bridge between real-time performance capture running in a real-time runtime of the Unreal Engine without any additional mediating production steps to capture the performance. It basically cut down on the costs, studio requirements, animation requirements, and production staff.
Epic was so impressed with this technique that they decided to advance on the technology that Ninja Theory made for the Unreal Engine 4 by teaming up with 3Lateral and Cubic Motion so that right out of the box the Unreal Engine 4 can allow for real-time, in-engine, CG-quality performance capture in an active runtime of the engine without pre-rendering. Games utilizing this tech will be coming out later in 2018, as well as a few titles making use of the DXR ray-tracing mechanics.
You can look for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice to launch on Xbox One and Xbox One X starting April 11th for $29.99.
